Open Access research with a European policy impact...

The Strathprints institutional repository is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde's Open Access research outputs. Strathprints provides access to thousands of Open Access research papers by Strathclyde researchers, including by researchers from the European Policies Research Centre (EPRC).

EPRC is a leading institute in Europe for comparative research on public policy, with a particular focus on regional development policies. Spanning 30 European countries, EPRC research programmes have a strong emphasis on applied research and knowledge exchange, including the provision of policy advice to EU institutions and national and sub-national government authorities throughout Europe.

Abstract

Drawing upon the domestic fiction by Italian women writers of the late nineteenth-century, in this article I argue that we can use this as evidence of history as a cultural undertaking. Through a reading of a selection of popular novels and short stories intended for a female readership, I demonstrate how domestic fiction provides crucial textual evidence for us to rediscover and reinterpret the (hi)story of women's sentiments and experiences in late nineteenth-century Italy. In so doing, I align the role of the narrator with that of the historian to conceive of history as representation; that is, not as fictional, but as fictive.